Nope. Today you can use a drone to produce a 3D image of a site, add the hole or trench you want dug and the excavator will dig it out.

It even senses where the dump truck is and puts all the spoil into it. Yes the dump truck is also autonomous.

I spend some time in a UK academy a few years back as a favour for a headmaster. Each secondary school had their own IT system, each was unique, and every man and his dog had some form of admin rights with a VMWare cluster underneath a WinTel solution and Google classrooms in the cloud. Add in teachers sticking malware laden USB sticks into their desktops (essential teaching materials) and connecting personal laptops to the network.

They were paying just over minimum wage for someone to manage and maintain the whole thing and fair to say they had problems every other week.

Scotland have an issue with leaking pipes due to a lack of maintenance and upgrades but it is masked by the copious rainfall. It will eventually be a problem as the sink holes get bigger and bigger.

Clydesdale Bank, now Virgin Money, do this all the time, Utter, utter, wankers training their customers to give away their security to cold callers.

And yes they call from a withheld number and proceed to ask for all your security details. When you suggest that you will call back to the number on their website and can they have a reference they won't give a reference as you have not given the cold caller your details, If you can be bothered to call the numbers on their website some very exasperated call center minions apologise and commiserate.

When it is done properly with sanctions for clicking on the bait it works. I work on two systems with over 150K users on each, phishing training combined with link security works, It's not cheap, but it works.

Trying to learn Italian I thought I was doing OK and after some success in buying metro tickets in Rome persevered with Duolingo until it started asking me to translate "the elephant is coming to lunch".

That's plain weird.

Here in the UK there are several projects using radar and lasers to dissuade bats and birds from flying into the blade paths. It happens enough for the operators to fund the development and installation of the equipment.

Is this the same Amazon who's CEO has been partying the length of European fleshpots to excess for the last month? The one who Amazon has given more money than is decent - even Croesus would blush at the excess - suggesting that they are more than capable of hiring more warehouse workers rather than asking the office staff to roll up their sleeves.

This only works in the sort of organisations where the CEO leads by example and puts in the first shift themselves.

Currently instead of the sites that you are looking for Google serve up sites that want to sell you things that they think you might buy and those sites are selected by Google based on how much they are prepared to pay Google for being served up.

Google have killed the advertising market for local events, it's now almost impossible to effectively advertise a concert to a potential audience, and lots of publishers are going out of business.

In the UK we have had remote ATC running for the last four years.

You can read about it here: https://www.caa.co.uk/media/0c...

Pack in the 1980's and 1990's fourth generation languages (4GLs) were going to allow people to produce spiffing applications without the need for anyone who could actually code. The languages of the day, Algol, Cobol, and FORTRAN would be consigned the dustbin of history.

Access, Visual Basic, and Frameworks all made similar promises and now we have AI manifesting itself as the latest iteration of the Emperor's clothing.

Goats eat the plants right down to the roots and kill it - they are one of the reasons for deserts expanding in north Africa.

They will also wander about on top of the panels, eat through cables, and generally mess things about.

The ramifications of that decision have been mind boggling, even the people of Iran are suffering as the moderates were completely discredited by the religious hard liners with the knock on effect on human rights. Externally they have supported anyone and everyone that might be a thorn in the side of the USA be that in Gaze, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, and sooner or later they will back a terrorist even on mainland USA. The cost to the Europe and the USA of that decision could be in the 100s of Bns.

In the catalogue of dumb things that Donald has done, that's pretty much at the top of the list.

The BBC & SKY news channels have become magazine shows and increasingly are simply re-broadcasting output from other sources. e.g. 10 Sept BBC, SKY, and GBNews were all simply rebroadcasting the BBC Parliament channel and pasting social media comments over the top.

I'm afraid that is not news, especially when there is no meaningful attempt to present analysis and summation of what has gone before.

Presenters (they ain't journalists) frequently talk more than their interviewees who in turn are seldom allowed to finish a sentence let alone get their point across. I very rarely watch the 6pm or 10pm news shows and have given up completely on all of the breakfast shows who seem to have picked two or three stories from the overnight social media feeds, collected up a handful of opinionated charlatans with diametrically opposing views, and then try and stir up an incident that will be reported in social media later in the day. Bonus points if it goes viral.

They introduced cats to Diego Garcia decades ago in the belief that they would address the rat problem. When I visited there a couple of decades ago they were in the process of trapping the cats and in parallel were poisoning and trapping the rats.

There was also an issue with the feral chicken population, but I can't remember if that was causing any problems.